Indiana University is making possible new types of research, pedagogy, and creative activity by developing a research infrastructure that combines robust systems and services with advances in computer science and informatics to address the information technology needs of researchers and their collaborators across the State of Indiana and around the world. This architecture of technology, people, and applications comprises the Indiana University ResearchWorks.
Robust, reliable systems and services form the foundation of the ResearchWorks. Indiana University unites its centralized, comprehensive information technology organization — University Information Technology Services (UITS) — with strategic corporate, government, and community partnerships to deliver a world-class infrastructure dedicated to supporting cutting-edge research and novel creative activity.
Effectively connecting scholars and researchers with advanced computing, storage, visualization, and networking resources requires flexible and stable middleware. Indiana University is leading strategic middleware initiatives that bring local, national and global resources to bear in solving important computational and scientific challenges. Advanced middleware research from IU's School of Informatics, Pervasive Technology Labs, and UITS forms an essential layer of the ResearchWorks infrastructure.
Indiana University's research and creative communities are employing the IU ResearchWorks to make new discoveries and to achieve bold, new forms of creative expression. Advanced applications in the life sciences, physical sciences, engineering, and the arts are helping to create a new standard of living for citizens of Indiana and are improving the quality of life across the globe.
The top level of the ResearchWorks represents the collaborative communities that Indiana University is building on the state, national, and international scale through its partnerships with leading universities, national laboratories, funding agencies, and private-sector partners. These multi-institutional collaborations aggregate and leverage the expertise and resources of global communities, increasing the pace and scale of discovery by orders of magnitude over what is possible by any single institution.
Data is a critical asset and artifact of research, requiring a comprehensive response to the problems of collection, refinement, publishing, archiving, and curation. Indiana University researchers are developing a unified, data-centric computing approach to the challenge of distilling new knowledge from data. Data-centric computing is a new and major crosscutting thrust of the ResearchWorks architecture that will inform all future strategic, information technology initiatives.